Ryan Nelsen of StackAdapt on AI Orchestration, Proactive AI, and Brand Trust

Jeanniey Walden: Hey Ryan, thanks so much for joining me here to talk about what’s happening at Cannes, why you’re here, what you’re looking forward to, and what you think is going to happen in the future.

Ryan Nelsen: Very excited to be here. Thank you.

Jeanniey Walden: As I’ve been interviewing people, I’ve been asking them the same thing. What did you expect to hear being spoken about at Cannes? Some people have been surprised, and others said it’s exactly what they thought. Why did you come to Cannes? What were you looking forward to the most?

Ryan Nelsen: I think this industry is about relationships, and a lot of the CMOs and top leaders are here, so I love learning from each of them. I’ve had a chance to join several CMO roundtables this week, great discussion, but it comes down to the people. And mostly for us at StackAdapt, we’re here to meet clients and partners and make sure they’re being taken care of.

Jeanniey Walden: I heard that Cannes is the place where business actually gets done, versus some events where it’s really just networking. Are you getting business done here?

Ryan Nelsen: Yeah, back-to-back meetings with clients. There’s a lot of places we could and should be, and there’s so much going on here, but we’re prioritizing client meetings first, and in between, fitting in some other things.

Jeanniey Walden: I’ve been hearing different tracks of conversation. Some have said AI, some retail media and commerce media, some the business of news. What have you been hearing most?

Ryan Nelsen: I think it comes down to AI orchestration. It’s a hot topic for us. Last year we were talking about what the future would be with AI. Now it’s about outcomes and how you make that a reality. It’s gone from experiments to execution, and the orchestration of what that looks like end to end, from the very beginning to all the outcomes we’re trying to drive.

Jeanniey Walden: Have the conversations been more strategic or more tactical? Because I’ve been in both, and it’s really interesting.

Ryan Nelsen: I’ve had several roundtable chats, and what’s fascinated me is that even though AI is the topic, it keeps coming back to human. How do we keep this industry human? How do we keep the creativity? We go do more with AI, but I have this thought: we should use AI to automate systems and process, but we should not use AI to automate our point of view as marketers.

Jeanniey Walden: For people watching and listening, because it’s a podcast and a TV show, tell everybody what StackAdapt does, so they understand why that resonates with you.

Ryan Nelsen: We’re an AI advertising platform, a DSP in the easiest sense of the word. Advertisers, brands, and agencies can buy ads across connected TV, digital out of home, audio, video, podcasts, and more. They come to us, upload their creative, find their audiences and personas, and we help them target those audiences across basically every channel. Then we give them measurement and reporting, and with AI it gets better, faster, and more personalized, so they can drive the outcomes they want.

Jeanniey Walden: Are you in the bucket of segmentation or signals when you’re looking for audiences?

Ryan Nelsen: I think both are important.

Jeanniey Walden: When you’re talking about AI automation to build these audiences and advertise across networks, where do you see retailers going? Are they hitting walls and looking for new audiences? Using it for loyalty? How do you see people most effectively using what you do?

Ryan Nelsen: It comes down to understanding your audience, and there are competitive advantages right now with AI. The faster we’re learning, testing, and iterating, the faster we gain that edge. We have a lot of data on the platform, 40,000 brands, so we see a lot of campaigns that are working and things that could be optimized. We recently launched Ivy. You wake up in the morning, open the platform, and it says, I have seven things for you today, do you want me to optimize these? This is what we recommend. So rather than poking around dashboards, it’s proactive. We call it proactive AI.

Jeanniey Walden: I love that. It makes so many people’s lives easier. So if someone’s getting started with advertising on an AI platform, what are the three things they need to know?

Ryan Nelsen: At the end of the day, it doesn’t need to be that hard. Start small in some ways, and test and iterate. This is a creative festival, but the math behind these campaigns, we can take care of a lot of that. We want the creativity, the ideas, and to help brands be successful. We have an easy-to-use platform, and we’re known for that, but we’re known for our people as well.

Jeanniey Walden: Last question. You made the platform easy, you leverage AI to take out the questionable elements people spend hours on. Do you think it still comes down to trust with brands? Are brands still needing to develop trust?

Ryan Nelsen: Absolutely. As a CMO, I’m a marketer marketing to marketers, and we use our own platform to promote our brand, so we push our product team as a B2B customer to keep getting better. On brand trust, I always think about relationships. Think about the most important people in your life. They’re most likely giving you more than they’re taking, depositing into your life versus making withdrawals. Brands need to do the same. To build big brand trust, we’ve got to make deposits, not withdrawals.

Jeanniey Walden: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts. Everybody, stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Ryan Nelsen: Thank you.